Abdel Fattah al-Burhan
Abdel Fattah al-Burhan is the general who has been Sudan's head of state since the army removed Omar al-Bashir in April 2019, who agreed a transition to civilian rule with the protest movement that had brought Bashir down, overthrew the civilian prime minister with his deputy Hemedti in October 2021, and in April 2023 went to war with that deputy's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces in a conflict that has killed tens of thousands, driven more than ten million people from their homes and produced the largest famine of the century. He commands the regular army from Port Sudan, having lost most of Khartoum in the first weeks. He was born in 1960 north of Khartoum, was commissioned in the army in the 1980s, and served in the south in the civil war and in Darfur after 2003 as a regional commander, in the years when the army and the Janjaweed militias burned the villages. He was later the coordinator of the Sudanese contingent, most of it RSF, that Saudi Arabia and the Emirates hired for the war in Yemen, which is where his connection with the Gulf and with Hemedti was made. Bashir made him inspector-general of the army in February 2019, and on 11 April the generals arrested Bashir. The first chairman of the junta lasted a day, and Burhan replaced him. The sit-in outside army headquarters was cleared by the RSF on 3 June with more than a hundred dead, and under African Union and Ethiopian mediation the generals and the civilians signed in August a constitutional declaration for a sovereignty council under Burhan for the first twenty-one months and a civilian after. He signed the Abraham Accords normalisation with Israel in 2020 to get Sudan off the American terrorism list, and on 25 October 2021, weeks before the handover was due, dissolved the government and arrested the prime minister, Abdalla Hamdok, whom he reinstated and who resigned. The framework agreement of December 2022 for a return to civilian rule required the RSF to be merged into the army, and the quarrel over how fast became the war. Fighting began in Khartoum on 15 April 2023. He escaped the besieged headquarters in August 2023 and has governed from Port Sudan since, with Egyptian backing and Emirati weapons going to the other side, retaking central Khartoum in March 2025 while the RSF took El Fasher and Darfur.
- Lived: 1960 CE – ?
- Nationality: Sudanese
- Roles: general, head of state
